SOVIET UNION

Moment of Pravda

TIBOR SZAMUELY

For me the recent postal strike held a very special horror: the mounting realisation that once it had ended 1 would have to read through weeks and even months of Pravda at one go. Sure enough, a few days after Toni Jackson's whiskers flickered on the screen for the last time the monstrous back- log began cascading through my letterbox.

'Pravda' is the Russian for 'truth', while 'Izvestiya'—the number two paper—means 'news'. Hence a popular Soviet proverb: there is no news in Pravda and no truth in lzvesiiya. While it may be an exaggeration to say that there is no news at all in Pravda, certainly their concept of news is rather different from ours. The front page should normally be skipped, unless one is particularly interested in stories of glorious production victories or in wordy com- muniqués on talks with foreign delegations. Page two is devoted to party life. The life of the party is pretty dreary at best, and few people stop to read detailed accounts of cur- ricula for party education in Minsk or Chita. Page three: more productive successes, or achievements in the field of culture.

Then we come to two pages of 'foreign news'. Most of it would indeed be news to us foreigners. Long stories (once again, I am afraid) of production successes in the Socialist countries. Moving accounts of Czechoslovak toilers enthusiastically study- ing a vast party resolution on `The Lessons of the Crisis Situation in the Communist Party and the Society of Czechoslovakia after the thirteenth Congress of the cre: one young worker had already read it three times because, he explained, 'It is not enough to read it just once'. No kidding!

Several headings have become permanent features. Under 'Freedom for Angela Davis' we can read all about the world-wide com- munist campaign in defence of the heroic, youthful, brilliant, beautiful, Negro and woman lecturer despicably charged with murder. 'Events in Olster' (or Ulster, as it is otherwise known) describes the inhuman rapine committed by a blood-crazed British soldiery upon innocent and unarmed people.

Britain, in fact, gets a good deal of at- tention. Mr James Aldridge, one of those writers who are best-sellers in Russia while almost totally unknown in their own coun- try, informs the readers of Pravda that no more secondary schools are being built here, and that the building of council houses is being completely stopped. In contrast to this wretched state of affairs he proudly points out that the new Soviet five-year plan pro- mises to raise workers' incomes by twenty to twenty-two per cent. By an interesting coin- cidence, another article in the very same issue of Pravda contained the information that Russian eggs—when available—cost 6p apiece, 'or three times as much as in Britain.

The Soviet toilers receive a rich and many- hued coverage of the world scene. Events in China are written up exclusively on the basis of negative Western press reports. Practically the only item with a Peking by-line appeared under the bizarre heading 'Worthy of Regret': it reported that 4 the Chinese authorities had prevented Soviet represen- tatives from visiting Russian military

cemeteries. However, as lengthier ideological reviews authoritatively explain, this in no way reflects the true feelings of the Chinese people, who—like all the world's peoples —harbour deep affection for the USSR.

Not only the world—the home front is fully covered as well. Why, even the two

matters which most arouse our decadent interest, the Solzhenitsyn case and the posi- tion of the Jews, receive mention.

Solzhenitsyn's name appears once, in an open letter from one Dean Reed. described as a world-famous American singer resident in Italy, who upbraids the novelist for betraying the cause of socialism. As for the Jews, they get extended treatment in a two-

part article, a kind of sequel to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which fully exposes Jewish responsibility for everything from the Russian civil war to the Hitler terror.

From time to time the Soviet press finds space to refer to the imperfections, be they

ever so rare, of life in the USSR. All is not well, for example, in the field of publishing. Certain state publishing houses have suc-

cumbed to ideological weaknesses: in their unseemly desire to produce at least some

books that people actually buy they resort to printing huge quantities of Western bourgeois detective novels. In the past five years fifteen Agatha Christie thrillers have been serialised in a variety of journals, from Village Youth to Asia and Africa Today, This plaintive call for ideological purity comes from Mr G. Anjaparidze, the very man whose all too human weakness for Soho strip-joints enabled Kuznetsov to slip away from his care two years ago.

Most instructive of all are the occasional stories about the tribulations of the Soviet consumer. A worker from Voronezh describes how he has to spend his whole an- nual vacation—twenty-one days minus four hours to be precise—driving his outboard motor-boat, without stopping for sleep, rest or food : the factory guarantee is valid only on condition that the motor has been in use for 500 hours during the first year.

Nothing out of the ordinary; years of reading the Soviet press make one ac- customed to the same old complaints that never get remedied. When suddenly, in the only really sensational article of the lot, I learn that someone has invented an amazing new method of getting things done: by means of free private labour. It transpires that hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of self-employed groups of construction workers tour the countryside, signing building contracts with collective farms and other state enterprises, setting their own prices, supplying their own materials, getting money transferred to their own bank ac- counts. One such contractor carried out £1 million worth of construction work in a single rural district. Such capitalist en-

terprise, it goes without saying, is strictly illegal—yet the workers get paid four or five times the official rate.

No wonder a correspondent of Litera- iurnaya Gazeta wistfully quotes Adam

Smith on the advantages of the profit motive.

Adam Smith! Here then, one would think, lay the solution to Russia's manifold economic problems: private enterprise. But

not a bit of it—Pravda was writing more and more about the glorious preparations for another glorious Communist Subbotnik on the glorious 17 April: the date that every glorious Soviet worker turned out to do a glorious days work without pay.